Fo’Fonas Symbol

It’s been awhile since we talked about Fo’Fonas here on the site, and I am forced to admit that’s because I haven’t done very much work on that series recently. Keeping up with the higher tempo of blog posts that we’ve been doing recently has taken up some of my writing time, but the real culprit has been Blood Magic; writing a new episode every month, plus doing revisions on a season one episode, has come to take up a very significant portion of my writing time. What extra time I’ve had has been too scattered to apply to something like Fo’Fonas, which at this point is such a sprawling and complex world that it really demands that I sit down and dedicate at least a week to working exclusively on those stories.

That does not mean, however, that I’ve forgotten about Fo’Fonas. I’m still very excited about the potential that this world and series holds, and just because I haven’t made writing progress recently does not mean that I haven’t been thinking about it, which is sometimes almost as useful. For instance, one of the threads I sort of dropped in the rough draft of the first book was the idea of the magic being dangerous to its wielders, and I think I finally solved just what makes it dangerous. It turns out that the “magic” has motivations and desires of its own, or at least an objective that does not necessarily align with that of its users.

But this is not a post about all of the thoughts I’ve had recently about Fo’Fonas. Nor are we going to talk about whether Verdon’s Tragedy still has any chance of being finished in 2021 (there are always possibilities). No, what I really wanted to do, besides remind you all that Fo’Fonas is still a thing that I’m working on and that you can expect to see at some point, is present the preliminary Fo’Fonas symbol.

Around the time that I did the whole site redesign last year, I also worked to redesign the series splash pages. I finished Blood Magic‘s, which you’ve been able to see for awhile now, but the redesign for the Fo’Fonas series splash page got left in permanent draft status, in large part for want of a symbol (and because I wasn’t sure what content to include). At least Blood Magic has its symbol, even if it isn’t exactly a wonderful work of art. However, I was bored recently, and started sketching some ideas in my notebook for a Fo’Fonas symbol, and really liked what I came up with, enough to sit down and try to make something more useful out of it.

My idea was a medallion, perhaps something that the priestesses at Pinalora might wear, that incorporated the shape of the Fo’Fonas temples, and of course the number of the nine gods. Having the rough for of a temple was somewhat important to me, because that would help readers to better visualize the temple form, which is somewhat important to the story’s background. Although I’m not sure if I’ll retain the original bronze weaponry from the first draft, I was inspired somewhat by bronze age artwork, and so I wanted the symbol to look like an old, bronze medallion, something made by hand, so that it would have lots of imperfections and irregularities in the surface.

In other words, something that was not going to be captured adequately by an abstract PowerPoint sketch, the way I did the Blood Magic symbol and the IGC symbol. Considering my general artistic abilities (or lack thereof), I also knew that there was no way I would be able to sketch it by hand satisfactorily. Then, I remembered something I used to tell people: the only thing I can draw with is CAD software. I decided to try creating the medallion symbol in Autodesk Inventor.

Modeling the form was not particularly difficult; the challenge came in trying to get the appearance to match what I had in my head. Inventor is a powerful tool for modeling, and includes a large materials and appearance library, but engineers are not typically looking to accurately represent ancient Egyptian era bronzework. I think I managed to get something close, though it’s not quite what I envisioned. I might try to port it over to another software, like 3DS MAX, which is more focused on graphics, to refine the symbol further, but I really am pleased with this as a starting point.

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What do you think of the new symbol? Let me know in the comments below.